Relooking the gendered labour differentials of Zari craft of Bengal

Over the past three decades, Feminist Scholars have successfully demonstrated the ubiquity and omnipresence of gender in varied economic fronts. Gender shapes and is shaped, in all arenas of social and economic life, from the huge gamut of unpaid household labour to those of the most powerful corporate actors. Despite playing such a veritable role in creating, crafting, and sustaining our lives, through these myriad sets of activities, women in most of the corners of the world remain under paid and un recognised. The narratives of labour exclusion in terms of basic labour rights, and dignity become all the pronounced in informal economy. The given paper, drawing from the ontologies of a group of both male and female zari craft workers of Bengal, aims to relook in the saga of gender expropriation. How women home based workers, continue to remain unseen, unheard and un recognised in the wider discourse of gendered labour policy, while male workers remain the pivot of industry, forms one of the primary methodological accounts of the paper. The empirical understanding of the varied caveats of labour exclusion, is related with the wider market, state, and kinship analogies of gender representation.